SALMAN RUSHDIE
Random House, 2012, 636 pages, $35 (pb)
There was much that was hard to take for the author of The Satanic Verses – not being able to
pick up his own mail, not being able to go for a walk without armed police
taking an hour to set it up for him, being robbed of the deep concentration
necessary for creative writing. That,
and the constant threat of violent assassination.
Salman Rushdie’s memoir of his decade dodging death vividly shows how he (as Joseph Anton, his security alias named after two of his favourite authors – Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekov) coped with his loss of liberty and the death threat (fatwa) issued against him in 1989 by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini by, in the end, taking his fight for free speech to his would-be silencers.
The London-based writer from a free-thinking Indian Muslim
family artfully combined left wing politics with the personal in his
novels. In 1981 came the Booker-winning Midnight’s Children, about India’s
independence, then Shame, about
Pakistan’s military governments, followed by The Satanic Verses, his “origin story of Islam” which scrutinised
Muhammad’s ‘divinely revealed’ text, the Qur’an, like any other book, as a
human product of history, sociology, psychology and politics.
In Iran, Khomeini headed up a “mullocracy” which had usurped
the 1979 revolution - the Ayatollah, says Rushdie, had “murdered those who
brought him to head of the revolution” and dispatched others he disliked –
“unionists, feminists, socialists, Communists, homosexuals”. The
Satanic Verses had a portrait of an Imam like Khomeini, “eating his own
revolution”. Unpopular because of a
disastrous war with Iraq, the ruling clerical caste needed to regain political
momentum and found its rallying point in Rushdie and his ‘offensive’ novel.
Iranian government hit squads and a million dollar,
quasi-governmental bounty, and British Islamic extremists, meant the death
threat “was not merely theoretical”. Books
were burnt, bookstores and libraries fire-bombed, mass ‘KILL THE DOG’ Muslim
rallies held in Hyde Park, threatening letters sent written in blood,
translators and publishers stabbed, shot and killed.
Rushdie was protected by Special Branch police - their
“ordinary human kindness … toward a fellow human being in ‘one hell of a jam’ …
never ceased to move him”. He was less
enamoured of their ‘higher-ups’ in Scotland Yard who poorly disguised their
distaste for him because he was a Labour man in a Tory administration who,
unlike the politicians under their guard, ‘had not performed a service to the
nation’.
There were others hostile to Rushdie. Britain’s Conservative Prime Minister,
Margaret Thatcher, would not meet him because this would ‘send the wrong
message’ to Iran (it certainly sent the wrong message on free speech). A meeting with her successor, John Major, was
scuttled by a Tory backbench which “by a curious coincidence” allowed a
proposed British trade delegation to Iran to proceed. The historian and Tory peer, Hugh
Trevor-Roper, mused on how British Muslims should ‘waylay him in a dark street
and seek to improve his manners’.
Labour politicians equivocated, worried about the Muslim
vote. A British Muslim community leader
who declared that ‘death is, perhaps, a
bit too easy’ for Rushdie was knighted on the recommendation of Labour Prime
Minister, Tony Blair.
Prince Charles called Rushdie a bad writer who cost the
government too much to protect (the irony detector of this expensive, taxpayer-supported
social parasite who has never written anything of interest must have been on
the fritz when he said this). Pop singer
and Muslim convert, Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam) kept bubbling up in the media
“like a fart in a bathtub”, joining the chorus demanding a grovelling apology
from Rushdie for causing religious ‘offense’.
The tabloid media banged on about the ungrateful reprobate
who ‘hated Britain’, with the Daily
Insult maintaining a steady character assassination (he was ‘bad-mannered,
sullen, graceless, silly, curmudgeonly, unattractive, small-minded, arrogant
and egocentric’). The ‘liberal’ media
found the usual two sides to it all, “shifting the blame from the men of
violence to the target of their attack” because Rushdie had ‘brought it on himself’.
Many more, however, sprang to Rushdie’s defense. With moral support, solidarity declarations
and safe houses, writers rallied to his side universally (apart from John le
Carré, nursing a grudge about
a negative book review Rushdie had once written of a le Carré novel, saying that Rushdie had
been ‘impertinent to great religions’ and was engaging in ‘cultural intolerance
masquerading as free speech’).
Many people bought Rushdie’s book as an act of solidarity,
and wore ‘I AM SALMAN RUSHDIE’ badges.
Building workers guessed why bullet-proof glass was required in the
ground-floor windows in a house they were renovating for Mr Anton but staid mum
because they “understood that this was an important secret to keep; and so,
quite simply, they kept it”.
Warmly-received, surprise appearances at literary events
were life-giving whilst, on airlines which allowed the terrorist target to
board, he found spontaneous “friendship, solidarity and sympathy” from the
passengers. Eighty thousand U2 fans
cheered him on stage at Wembley Stadium.
When nervous bookchains in North America withdrew the book from sale,
their staff unions protested and volunteered to stand next to plate-glass
windows with the book display.
On a world book tour, an Algerian restaurateur named Rouchdy
(pronounced Rushdie) was proud of the high-risk name-association - ‘I was
always getting mistaken for you! I say,
no, no, I am much better looking!’. In
Australia, an ambulance officer who attended a near-fatal crash between Rushdie
and a semi-trailer on the Princes Highway was delighted to ask for his
autograph.
This determination of
his supporters “not to allow the darkness to prevail” strengthened Rushdie’s
“battle against hopelessness”, making him straighten his shoulders and campaign
against the fatwa. Staying low, and trying to love and be loved
by his enemy, had proved futile. “Enough
of invisibility, silence, timidity, defensiveness, guilt”, he resolved – “there
was more dignity in being a combatant than a victim”.
In 1998, Iran formally ended the fatwa, a victory won by “ordinary people”, says Rushdie, for the
principle of free speech. All those who
vacillated, who demanded apology and compromise, who dragged the red herrings
of taxpayer cost and Rushdie’s personality across the free speech trail, who
muddied the waters in the name of opposing ‘Islamophobia’, were objectively on
the side of the book-burners and assassins. Rushdie is wholly persuasive about this.
What he is less than convincing on is that “Islam itself”,
and not just the radical fringes of its one billion followers, is fatally
corrupted by religious intolerance. Some
of Rushdie’s toughest defenders were Muslims, who were assaulted or killed by
their fanatical brethren for their pains.
Rushdie’s attempt to taint all Muslims with the “bloody theocracies” of
dictatorial Islamic states, as with his glib parallel of equating Marxism with
repressive Stalinist states, is not compelling.
Part of a critique of “religious unreason” is how power
inequalities between the West and the Muslim world are refracted through
religion, not caused by it. A radical
anti-Islam stand can lead to uncritical support for the hypocritical donning of
the mantle of ‘freedom’ by Western powers in their political crusades against
Muslim countries, and, sure enough, Rushdie fell into trap of supporting the
US-led war against Afghanistan on anti-terrorism grounds.
As Rushdie would no doubt accept, however, the “ability to
quarrel”, over his politics as with religion or anything else, is fundamental
to a free society. His own determination
to fight violent censorship, and his brilliantly-written memoir, have
strengthened the right to free speech.
